Abstract:
How can development policy support weak, dysfunctional or fragile states? What constitutes state
fragility and what are the appropriate instruments for state-building? After reviewing two recent
quantitative indexes (The Index of State Weakness in the Developing World and The Ibrahim Index of
African Governance), this paper cautions against the current tendency to categorise a large number of
countries as weak, fragile or failing states. Drawing upon country case studies on Namibia, Somalia
and Guinea-Bissau, the paper argues that state-building is fundamentally a political process and
external “state-builders” need to develop greater understanding of the internal dynamics of individual
societies in order to provide appropriate support to address state fragility. Current strategies for statebuilding
are heavily weighted in favour of technical, institutional and formal arrangements. Moreover,
since 9/11, the international state-building agenda has increasingly focused on state weakness as a
challenge for international peace and security, rather than as an issue of national governance. As a
result, many preferred policy prescriptions risk weakening the very states that they hope to strengthen.
